Me and the Poets
If you were to ask me if I liked poetry I’d respond, it depends on what kind. I don’t really care for super long-winded guys like Whitman, who never knew when he was done, or Pound with his endless Cantos. I guess my preferences are pithy, the pithier the better. Emily Dickinson is the very definition of pithy, but I also love Wallace Stevens, probably my favorite poet, who could go on with his “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and “The Blue Guitar,” but regularly made his point in fewer stanzas.
Among the moderns (how I date myself by calling the post-‘60s modern), I am a huge fan of Alan Dugan, grounded in the Greek classics, and as tough-minded as any seer of the twentieth century. His famous “Funeral Oration for a Mouse” brings humanity down to size, while “Love Song: I and Thou” has a refreshingly jaundiced view on sexual relationships, and “How We Heard the Name” imagines Greek soldiers finding out about Alexander the Great. He is as unsentimental a poet as any who ever lived.
As to poetry read aloud, I am generally against it. I have been to many poetry readings and derived little benefit because I did not have the text before me. To hold the words in mind, the rhythms, the assonance, even the line breaks, is impossible without seeing the printed word. Some poetry is meant to be heard, I will grant, if it has a musical character: it must sing. Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the virtuosi of sounded language, certainly composed to be heard; Tennyson, Poe, even Wordsworth and Coleridge can profitably be recited. But most modern poetry, no. Which would seemingly make me unfit to have any role in a poetry festival — necessarily a performance in front of an audience. Can you even imagine a social literary event where attendees are issued stapled texts to be perused privately and at their own leisure?
Yet, despite my private misgivings, I was invited many years ago to consult on the artistic line-up for the Tucson Poetry Festival. Before I go any further, I need to preface the following narrative with the admission that I was not remotely connected to the Tucson poetry community; I was not a poet, not an active supporter, not even a disinterested participant. I was happy they existed, I was in favor of the art, I wished them no ill. I had personal friends who were poets, and loved them despite their disability (that’s a joke that only the artistically marginalized will understand).
My own personal disability was as a fan and advocate of avant-guard jazz. I had produced a nationally noted (by the discriminating few) radio program for nearly twenty years, devoted to the most adventurous currents in jazz; written for many 80s- 90s era national publications on the subject; had launched a non-profit performance series that brought Steve Lacy, David Murray, Oliver Lake, Sam Rivers, Evan Parker, the Rova Saxophone Quartet, Ellery Eskelin, Gerry Hemingway, Ray Anderson, Roswell Rudd, and Joe McPhee to Tucson (check out a jazz history book — you will find these names); and had been elevated locally as the Music Director of the NPR Public Radio Jazz station. I was indisputably THE jazz man of Tucson during those years.
So when the Tucson Poetry Society decided to adopt a theme of poetry and jazz for their upcoming festival, my friend Lisa, a poet and jazz fan, suggested that I should be consulted. Lisa, in addition to our long relationship in writing groups, was my editor at the lifestyle monthly where I occasionally contributed culture pieces, and which was the media sponsor of the festival. I was flattered to be invited and enthusiastic about the project.
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The conjoined legacy of the two genres naturally lent itself to considering their mutual connections. By the mid-50s jazz had ceased to be dance music, as the swing era gave way to be-bop and later developments. It became a listener’s music, to be closely attended to in intimate club settings and on recordings. Around this same time the pioneering Beat poets set out to make poetry a performative art. Ginsberg’s Howl received its public debut not in print form, but as a reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October of 1955, where he had recently relocated. The Beats became widely perceived as jazz fanatics largely due to Kerouac’s ecstatic vignettes in On the Road, even when their enthusiasms were often largely incoherent and ahistorical.
During that same era the more adventurous currents of jazz likewise found themselves relegated to the galleries, small bars, and coffee houses of the urban centers of the east and west coasts. Finding themselves in similar artistic ghettos, mainly on Monday nights when commercial expectations were negligible, the two parties found common ground. Jazz musicians accompanied readings, incorporated poetry into their own performances, and collaborated in fully integrated projects. Many of the founders of the jazz avant-garde, including Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and such communal groups as Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Music and New York’s October Revolution in Jazz and Jazz Composer’s Guild incorporated poetic recitation among their activities in the ’50s and ‘60s.
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When I did finally meet with the festival’s programming committee they were quite receptive to my suggestions. I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me, but we seemed to have a mutual interest in a substantial festival. Because of the society’s relatively recent arrival on the national scene, I sensed that they intended to make a major splash in the wider literary/musical world. Consequently, I didn’t hold back in my recommendations. I mentioned Amiri Baraka (the former LeRoi Jones) as a major figure in the melding of both worlds, a former jazz critic and seminal chronicler of black music in his ground-breaking Blues People, who had subsequently gone on to renown as a poet, playwright, and academic. Other names considered included Jayne Cortez, David Amram, Gil-Scott Heron, and even Ken Nordine.
On the musical side, I was a little more reserved. There were a number of candidates suitable for a headliner — free-jazz legend Ornette Coleman (once married to Jayne Cortez); bebop pioneer and adventurous percussionist Max Roach; and younger saxophonist David Murray — all of whom had worked seriously with poets — but I held out for the biggest Kahuna of them all, pianist Cecil Taylor. I knew that his solo performances, especially, included his own incantatory poetry and spontaneous dancing as he approached the keyboard before striking the first key. He was a known master at melding genres. At that time he was very active in Europe where, throughout 40 years of constant activity, he had achieved the status of a living legend, after a lengthy career battling for recognition. His management would certainly insist that he be well paid. Fortunately, that wouldn’t be my problem. He was someone that my own series could have never approached.
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Since I was only there to suggest names, I felt no responsibility about the budget. Nor was I involved in any fee negotiations or other business matters. If only it were always that easy. But I did offer myself as a backstage liaison with the poet/musicians and to assist as all around helper.
As the lineup eventually came together, I was informed that they had engaged both Baraka and Taylor for the three day festival. In addition, the organizing committee had booked Joy Harjo, a regional favorite, having been on the University of Arizona and New Mexico writing faculties, and who also fulfilled the indigenous slot as a member of the Muscogee/Creek nation and was, conveniently, an amateur saxophone player. They’d also obtained the aforementioned Ginsberg, still living off Howl forty years after, and his mascot from the Naropa Institute, Anne Waldman. As I was to subsequently to discover, she was mainly there to babysit the neurotic genius. They’d also booked another local, Cynthia Hogue, finishing a doctorate at the University of Arizona, who I knew nothing about. None of it had much to do with jazz, but there were at least some musical connections.
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Although it was never explicitly spelled out, I got the sense that the committee was expecting me to keep Cecil entertained while he waited for his culminating Sunday matinee performance. I had a number of reservations about that role, some due to my innate insecurities, some to my responsibilities to my radio job, and others stemming from my knowledge of Taylor’s reputation as a notorious prima donna. I had a tremendous admiration for his artistry and his importance to the history of jazz, but I was also intimidated by him. I didn’t feel like I was up to assuaging his ego in a situation where he was obviously the big name, yet little known among the poetry community, and consequently less validated than he was accustomed to.
The theme was Jazz & Poetry, but the festival only really cared about the poetry, and hoped the “jazz” would take care of itself. An audience that might be excited by Cecil’s performance had little in common with the poetry crowd, who could predictably be expected to fawn over a celebrity like Allen Ginsberg. So I allowed my Saturday afternoon radio shift to give me cover to abdicate the responsibility I roughly intuited, and handed Cecil over to Chris, a fan of my jazz program, who I knew could handle Cecil’s demands, and with no apparent source of income, was always willing and available. That still left me with my Saturday night obligations.
I was to function as the intermediary between the backstage setup and the sound crew, which required a lot of back and forth during pre-concert sound-checks and the subsequent live transitions between each of the performers. I wasn’t a technical live sound guy, but I certainly understood a musician’s needs in live performance — monitor levels, mike placement, equalization. Since there were to be both solo and group performances, balances had to be established in advance. Everything seemed to be going smoothly after sound check so we all took a break.
The actual performance presented challenges, as it often does. Ginsberg was set to recite his droning verse over a self-accompaniment on his Indian harmonium, a bellows driven, keyboard reed instrument. It required amplification to be heard in a large hall, and also to be properly balanced with his own voice. For some reason the harmonium channel was not loud enough, and Ginsberg was unhappy. More than unhappy, he was frantic. I was sympathetic — sound problems can often undermine an artist’s intended performance. He knows how it should sound, and anything less is a reluctant compromise.
I assured him that we wouldn’t be proceeding until he was satisfied with the balance. But he was disconsolate, everything was ruined, it was a disaster. Anne Waldman came in to offer support and to reassure him that it would all work out. This might have amounted to a ten-minute delay; not that lengthy for a complicated multi-performance setup. I conveyed every problem to the front-of-house sound reinforcement team, which quickly adjusted the balances. Ginsberg nevertheless remained a basket case to the very end — I couldn’t help seeing the neurotic Buddhist, the notorious rebel against bourgeois conformity, the self-avowed pedophile — as anything other than a pitiful creature who needed his mommy. Does every great artist have feet of clay? Needless to say, every glitch was eventually resolved to the satisfaction of artist and audience alike.
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As I sat in the front row on Sunday afternoon ecstatically absorbing the hurricane that was Cecil Taylor at the keyboard, I gave a passing thought, for the first time, to the consequences for the piano. I understood that it had been leant by the Tucson Symphony, as they possessed the only 9-foot Steinway grand that was publicly owned in Tucson, and that major strings (not a pun, please) had been pulled to make it available. I also knew that it was the minimum standard in Cecil’s contracts, and that he actually preferred the much less common 97-key Austrian Bösendorfer, with its extended bass register. Anyone who had heard his earliest recordings on painfully out of tune uprights could appreciate his current strictures; the man certainly deserved the best.
I returned to my absorption in the performance while hoping for the best. Steinway was a quality manufacturer, after all, and produced pianos equal to the most exacting demands of extreme dynamic range. Cecil Taylor was exactly that musician who would test a piano. He was deceptively small in stature, now with voluminous dreads in his later years. Though he had often been described as “elfin” in his earliest days, he was also notorious as a pianist who never deferred to any limitations of the instrument. Some might even say that he was possessed in performance.
I was pleased to see that the audience was substantial and appreciative. After an hour and a half of relentless exploration, Cecil brought his performance to a close. Any anxiety over my role in the enterprise lifted a notch or two when I saw the pleasure of the audience and the grace with which Cecil accepted their applause. It wasn’t necessarily a jazz crowd, but they had clearly been moved by his music. How had it been received by the organizers? I don’t remember there being any festival post-mortem, or at least none I was invited to, but I had to assume the Poetry Society was happy with the results.
Over the subsequent weeks second-hand rumors filtered back to me that there had been some damage to the piano, even substantial damage, and that John Hudak, the money man representing the publisher behind the festival was not happy. We knew each other by sight but, had strangely never been introduced. It was an awkward situation for me to have been so little involved in the festival, and never explicitly condemned for my role, but to be potentially perceived as responsible for having inflicted a madman on the proceedings. If any of the organizers had truly cared, they might have checked out a YouTube video. If they had, there could have been no misunderstandings about what they were getting into. Cecil Taylor unequivocally challenged pianos. I don’t want to say it was a bad faith engagement with the jazz component, but it was certainly naïve and uninformed.
In later years, John and I would run into each other at cultural events, always with the barest nod of acknowledgement, and the slightest bit of a prolonged glare from him. It wasn’t the first time I was to be held responsible for good intentions gone awry, but it wasn’t to be the last. Tucson may have had a large metro population of ever-expanding suburbs, but its cultural core was concentrated indeed. That was my world, and it contained the people that mattered. That festival alone was not the reason I eventually left my home town, but it was yet another harbinger that bridges had been irrevocably burnt.
